With wide use of the Internet and the use of computers as one of the essential tools for family and work, people use browsers on the computers to access the Internet more frequently. Especially with rapid popularization of smart terminal devices, for example, smartphones and tablet computers, it becomes a daily behavior that a user uses a terminal browser to access the Internet. In the process that the user uses a browser to open a webpage, if a current network environment is restricted or the processing speed of a terminal device is limited, the speed of opening the webpage may be affected, resulting in that the user waits and the user's online experience is very poor. A main reason affecting the opening speed of the webpage is that the time to download content of the webpage is too long.
At present, a user's demand for quickly opening a webpage is met generally by employing a method of pre-reading a webpage possibly needed. The method is mainly as follows: in a process that a user browses a current webpage, a server side acquires webpages that the user may want in the next step. Before the user browses the webpages, websites of the webpages and resources thereof are first loaded into a local cache. When the user accesses a certain webpage therein, related data is directly read from the local cache and displayed to the user for reading, which avoids a process of waiting for downloading the webpage and shortens the webpage response time after the user performs a webpage access operation.
There are two common existing webpage pre-reading methods as follows:
The first one is that, when a user browses a certain webpage of continuous content, one or more keywords linked to adjacent webpages, for example, “page down”, “next page” and so on, included on the webpage are pre-read, and then linked webpage content is taken in sequence and placed in a local cache.
The second one is that, a webpage list is acquired from a server side, and then content of each webpage in the webpage list is read in sequence and placed in a local cache.
It can be known from the above that the first existing webpage pre-reading method is only applicable to particular webpages, that is, the method is only effective where a longer content is split into multiple webpages linked with hyperlinks. While for a great number of other webpages in the absence of a page number sequence, for example, news webpages and so on, with such a method, it is impossible to pre-read webpages that may be accessed by the user subsequently, and thus display of webpages by the browser cannot be sped up. In the second existing webpage pre-reading method, it is necessary to pre-read a significant amount of data and load the data into a local cache, which seriously occupies cache space and even leads to occurrence of insufficient cache space.
Some new pre-reading methods are also proposed to try to improve user experience.
For example, an idea of “guessing” webpages possibly to be accessed by users based on hot links on the webpages is proposed. With this method, webpages are pre-read, to improve effectiveness of pre-reading. For example, in a Chinese patent document disclosed on Sep. 12, 2012 with the Application Number of 201210074771.6 and entitled “a webpage pre-loading method and system,” the method includes: determining a hot link contained in a source webpage, and preloading a target webpage corresponding to the hot link. The manner of determining a hot link disclosed in the patent document is a method that is well known by persons skilled in the art. For example, one way of determining whether a certain link in a source page A is a hot link or not is based on the total number of times the link is clicked. Another way is based on an order that the user clicks each link. With such a method, the accuracy of determining the hot link is low. For example, the patent document with the Application Number of 201210074771.6 describes, in paragraph 0099, “in an actual application, a situation may exist where, although a user clicks a certain link, the user may not like or may not particularly like the link, and in this situation, if whether or not a link is a hot link is distinguished simply through the number of clicks, it may cause a result to be not accurate enough.” Similarly, the accuracy of determining a hot link based on an order that the user clicks each link is also low. For example, a situation also exists where the user is interested in multiple hot links included on the source page, while he/she may not click the hot links according to a certain order every day, and when hot spot information appears in a certain hot link, it is likely that the user first clicks the hot link. For example, during the football World Cup, the user may first click competition news of the World Cup; during the World Cup, if a new product release meeting is held for a famous brand, the user may first click a hot link about the new product. Even if the two manners are combined, the accuracy of determining a hot link in the combined manner may also be low.
In addition, the patent document with the Application Number of 201210074771.6 does not take into account the problem that the attention to a hot link attenuates with time. For example, in a period of time after the final NBA basketball game in the United States ends, a user's attention to the NBA column will be significantly reduced. For another example, hot news or hot headlines appear every day, the attention to today's hot news or hot headlines may be reduced tomorrow, and it is likely that nobody will pay attention thereto one week later.
For another example, an idea of “guessing” webpages possibly to be accessed by users based on the users' browsing habits is also proposed. By this method, the targeted webpages are pre-read to improve effectiveness of pre-reading. For example, in a Chinese patent document disclosed on Oct. 17, 2012 with the Application Number of 201110086435.9 and entitled “a webpage pre-reading method, apparatus and a browser,” the method disclosed includes: reading browsing habit information of a user; in a process that the user browses a current webpage, analyzing a webpage link to be pre-read according to the browsing habit information of the user, pre-reading webpage data corresponding to the webpage link from a server side, and storing the webpage data to a local cache. A pre-reading method disclosed thereby includes: pre-reading one or more webpage links in a position region of content on a webpage that the user often clicks, or recoding keywords on a certain webpage A clicked by the user, and next time the webpage A is opened, pre-reading first few or most webpage links that match the keywords. The disadvantage of such a webpage pre-reading method is evident. If one webpage link or first few webpage links that match the keywords is pre-read, the hit rate to pre-read webpage data for the user is very low, and if multiple webpage links or most webpage links that match the keywords are pre-read, it is necessary to pre-read lots of data and load the data into a local cache, which seriously occupies cache space and even leads to occurrence of insufficient cache space.
Therefore, a new webpage pre-reading method is desired.